Now that he’s gone

The assassination of Osama bin Laden in his compound in a city in Pakistan changed the placement of all the pieces on the board and focused attention on how Pakistan’s military will react. The great game goes on, and several players have a keen eye on the future of Afghanistan and Pakistan

The US raid in Pakistan on the night of 1-2 May only partly revealed the shadow war which the Americans and Pakistanis are engaged in; some of its secrets remain hidden.

Under the Bush administration, Pakistan in 2004 joined the privileged category of major non-Nato allies (MNNA), a club with fewer than 15 members, including Australia, Israel and Japan. Now, after the killing of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, near Pakistan’s most important military academy, there is a question mark over the real state of US-Pakistan relations. A week earlier in Abbottabad, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Pakistan’s chief of army staff, told a passing out parade that they had “broken the terrorists’ back”.

After Bin Laden’s assassination, Leon Panetta, head of the CIA, made it clear that Washington did not tell the Pakistani authorities about the raid in advance because “it was decided that any effort to work with the Pakistanis could jeopardise the mission. They might alert the targets”. The US decided to conduct a military operation in a sovereign country without its permission.

For months dialogue between the countries has been fitful. The US military has been dissatisfied with their Pakistani counterparts’ apparent inability to intervene in the tribal area of North Waziristan. the region from which the Haqqani network, the descendants of the Afghan mujahideen, carry out missions against Nato troops in eastern Afghanistan.

Panetta’s statement, in conjunction with the increased tension since 2 May between the Pakistani military and the CIA, contradicts the theory that there was a covert joint operation in which the Pakistani army played their Bin Laden card – under pressure or voluntarily – realising it would become worthless if secret contacts were established between the US and the Afghan Taliban.

Official statements from Pakistan suggest that the presence of Bin Laden, however long he had been there, was the result of a failure in the intelligence services of all the countries (...)

Jean-Luc Racine is director of research at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique and teaches at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales; he is co-editor of ‘Pakistan:Contours of State and Society’ (Oxford University Press, Karachi, 2002) and author of ‘Cachemire: Au péril de la guerre’ (Autrement, Paris, 2002)

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Translated by George Miller

Jean-Luc Racine is a director of research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and teaches at the Centre d’Etudes de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud in the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS); he is co-editor of Pakistan: the Contours of State and Society (Oxford University Press, Karachi, 2002)

(14) Interview by Ahmed Rashid on National Public Radio, Washington DC, 17 February 2010.

(15) Speech given by Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh to the Afghan parliament, Kabul, 13 May 2011.

(16) The concept of AfPak, popularised by Richard Holbrooke in 2008, treats Afghanistan and Pakistan as a single theatre of war. After protests from Islamabad, the US authorities now rarely use this term.